Calling it a day!

Ha! I’ve been thinking about it (seriously) for the past year but a bunch of things have conspired together in the last few months and there’s a little voice inside my head telling me it’s time to go.

Ignore those little voices at your peril!

Instead of selling all your stuff, how about I hang on to it for you until you return from your walkabout? 

Yea I get it dude...... it does sound like you're over it.

The 'starving' part of being a starving artist gets old.

It’s best to be honest with yourself.

I have made a couple of similar big decisions about my life recently and it came down to simply asking if something was or wasn’t making me happy. If the answer was no and I was really just engaged in a mostly frustrating process, I had the option of stopping it and now am happier.

You will be too: enjoy the change !

i deeply admire your bravery - not just for making the decision you’ve made, but also for sharing that decision on an audio board.

Best wishes!

Best of luck!  Enjoy the nomadic lifestyle!!

I did something completely different, but with similar motives.  I left a longstanding career in Los Angeles and moved to a location with virtually no recording industry.  But I kept my gear, built a new studio, and record my own music for licensing now.  The reward has been substantial.  I love life more, have more freedom, look forward to the next project, and I don't have to deal with the drama of bands and clients.  I'm still actively involved with writing and mixing - moreso than when I was in LA probably - but I'm enjoying it much more.  Best of both worlds for me.

But again, enjoy your life.  Recording is not the be all, end all occupation.  There are so many things more important.  Good luck!

Recording ambiences and SFX for film work?  If you're out there, why not record some?  There are guys who have made big careers out of exactly that....

I bought an almost mint EMT-140 plate reverb eighteen months ago which I will never see the likes of again in my lifetime so that is something I’m kind of in two minds about, more so than the Lexicon 480L I also have. But I’m never going back to a studio situation unless it was to say finish off a small project I had recorded elsewhere and I can’t justify (or afford) to have a load of gear sitting around for a year or more collecting dust.

I want to be pretty much free by the end of the year so I can’t afford to procrastinate or two years will go by and I’ll still be thinking about it.

My studio partner who owns the premises is interested in the EMT-140 (he can’t live without it seems) so he may take it but his long term situation is now somewhat uncertain due to personal issues.
 

I found the biggest "waste" of time for me in the studio is hunting for tone.  I guess nothing is a waste if it furthers your progress, but I think it tends to be needlessly lengthy.  I rarely have clients that are willing to pay for any type of pre-production, so they show up with their amps and guitars and expect me to capture "the tone" that will be the essence of the recording.  Generally what really happens is that they show up with strats and fender amps and expect me to get the LesPaul/Mesa sound out of it..  But rarely do I know that until it's time to mix.   I'll ask multiple times: "Is this tone good for you?" and I usually get a "yeah that's perfect!"..  Until mix time..

Seems that they change their mind regarding the tones between the times we track and the times we mix, and usually because their favorite bands have changed during this timeframe..

So I've adopted a new strategy, which is DI the guitar/bass as it comes from the jack, then loop that through their pedals/effects and out to another DI, then capture either an amp model through one of my modelling pedals, or the amp itself.   If I use the modelling pedal I usually come back and re-amp the effected signal.  I do it this way for maximum flexibility in tones during mixdown, but a HUGE benefit is that I can do all the re-amping later when the client isn't sitting there.  I have found that clients tend to want changes to tones simply because it's not quite like what they are used to in practice, so they have a tendency to push you back into their familiar territory.  Without that constant critique, I can find what works best in the mix on my own and submit it to them.  Usually they respond extremely well and rarely have change requests.  It's almost as if you get them far enough away from familiarity that they stop requiring it as a crutch.

Of course, this is all because if the need arises later, I have the clean guitar/bass on it's own that I can use different effects on, etc, or I can use the effected signal through a different amp, or re-amp through a different amp.

Also, I can track the drums, bass and guitar all at once in my small room, which drastically cuts down the amount of time needed to track each instrument and eliminates all bleed between instruments/amps.

I built a custom template in Reaper that handles all this in folders, with each instrument group as a folder, but each DI and model is a sub-track for that folder.  This way I can keep the same DI's and model pedals on the same inputs and just arm each folder as we work through the different instruments and no longer need to re-patch gear either.

All this cuts hours and hours off the usual cycle.